Category: Commentary
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Introduction Here is an interesting policy exercise: assume that you had to talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how it will change the way we work, do research, learn and so on in society – but you could not use the concept of “artificial intelligence” at all, but…
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What role does writing play in politics? Do we care about intellectuals penning long form essays about the future of the state or about official policy documents setting out frames and ideas for how to approach political issues? Historically the answer has been a very clear ‘yes!’. The role writing…
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Time to travel back to the city, sort out of a few things and then back to London. The trip back to Stockholm is 6 hours by car. I used to dread that, but have come to quite like the opportunity to think, listen to music and audiobooks as well…
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2022 was a reasonably eventful year, for me personally (the year globally is not the subject of this post). I took on a new job, at DeepMind, as global policy director. I also moved to London and now share my time between London and Stockholm, exploring what it feels like…
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The sun is setting over Camden. A new work week is coming up, and we are not sure who we are – or who we will be. Most of us are becoming. I met a man in the street today, walking down to buy some groceries, who walked slowly, elegantly…
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Looking back, it is fairly easy to see that the race to the moon was a geopolitical competition, an attempt to use a technological task as a proxy for answering the question of which political system was the most robust, innovative and effective. But was we enter an age of…
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Here is a narrative about the Internet that is getting more and more common: It certainly seems that the Internet is now the realm of a small number of enterprises that dominate this space. This is no longer a diverse, vibrant environment where new entrants compete on equal terms with…
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A recent study in PNAS suggests that we can at least start thinking about that through inversion – the study of what intolerance is. By looking at the areas of the brain that activate during polarized responses etc a group of researchers are now arguing that intolerance is strongly correlated…
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A culture is guided by its concept of happiness, and how that is located in the overall grammar of human existence – and our society is one that is focused on living a happy life. A result of that is that we often ask ourselves if we are happy –…
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Almost everyone has heard about the notion of “six degrees of separation” – that there are six jumps between any two persons in, say, the US. The experiment or game actually originates in a short story by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, The Chain, where the object of the game was…